Welcome back!
So I'm just going to jump right in here. About a week or so ago rumors started circulating that Marvel Comics would soon be regaining the rights to the Spider-Man movie franchise. It turns out that Sony (the company that currently owns the rights and more recently brought us that terrible movie Amazing Spider-Man 2) was hacked and a large number of emails between executives were leaked online. Many of these emails contained conversations about the future of the Spider-Man franchise.
Now, Sony has seen a lot of success with Spider-Man. The first 3 movies with Sam Raimi directing and starring Tobey McGuire saw record breaking box office draws and gained critical acclaim. After the major let down of Spider-Man 3, and the departure of Raimi and McGuire; Sony felt it was best to reboot the franchise. A reboot is simply taking an already established character and starting over fresh.
This was only an ok idea. Batman Begins had been recently released and saw great success, so the idea of darkening the Spider-Man story from the cartoony feel of the first 3 movies seemed like a good decision. And it was... to a point. We went from a loveable nerdy Peter Parker to a socially awkward hipster skater Peter Parker played by Andrew Garfield. Other changes included were Peter developing and building his own webshooters, a big difference for superfans of the character. In the first 3 movies, Peter's new super powers included natural webs shooting from his wrist. The Amazing Spider-Man may have modernized the character of Peter Parker, but also stuck to the comic books as far as Peter's abilities.
The Amazing Spider-Man also saw success at the box office. Nothing like the first Spidey movies, but enough for Sony to produce a sequel. Now at this point, Marvel (owned by Disney) released The Avengers and completely changed the way the world would see Super Hero Movies. They introduced us to a shared universe. This means that they took popular characters in successful solo movies like Iron Man and Captain America and put them on screen together. Now, herein lies the problem for us super fans. Marvel Comics has been publishing Spider-Man comics since 1963, we are all well aware of how important he is to the Marvel Comic Universe (he really REALLY is). So for the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to build up without Spider-Man is really hard to understand.
Sony saw the potential in what Marvel was doing and decided to do something similar with Spider-Man. Again, not a terrible idea, but poorly executed. In their attempt to build a universe around Andrew Garfield's Spider-Man, they rushed characters into The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and the result was difficult to watch. Spidey faced off against not just 1 new villain, but 3! Instead of writing a story the fans new and old could get behind and enjoy, they gave us a melodrama between real life couple Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone. In what should have been a film that built towards a huge battle between arch enemies Spider-Man and the Green Goblin and then teased a new movie to build the universe; we got a poorly written Goblin character, an underdeveloped Electro (played by Oscar Winner Jamie Foxx) and severly underused and possibly interesting character in The Rhino (played by Paul Giamatti). To top it all off, before the final box office numbers could be tallied, Sony released a statement that before we got an Amazing Spider-Man 3, we would get a Sinister Six movie and a Venom solo film. (The Sinister Six is a group of Spidey's villains that team up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinister_Six)(Venom is also a Spider-Man villain, possibly his most deadly and also very popular. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venom_%28comics%29)
The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was met with mediocre reviews and a very poor fan reaction. The leaked emails from the Sony hack would go on to reveal that Sony execs had been and would continue to meet with execs from Disney to possibly bring Spider-Man into the MCU. This was huge news.
So far we can only speculate as to what these meetings are about and the potential of Spider-Man sharing a screen with The Avengers. Until then, any ideas on how Marvel could incorporate Spidey into an already established universe?
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